Question

A catalog has a scale drawing of a floating dock. The dock is a regular octagon attached to a rectangular walkway. The scale drawing has a scale of 1 inch 4 feet. What is the actual length of a side of the octagon?

Answer 1

Answer: 5 feet.

Explanation:

Remember that the lenghts of the sides of a regular octagon are equal.

You can observe in the figure that the lenght of a side of the regular octagon is 1.25 inches.

Let be "s" the actual length of a side of the regular octagon.

Knowing that the scale drawing has a scale of 1 inch 4 feet, you can find the actual lenght of a side of this regular octagon with:

`s=((1.25in)(4ft))/((1in))\\\\s=5ft`

Therefore, the actual length of a side of the octagon is 5 feet.